Airplane JavaScript Challenge

No internet. Write an app…

I had a few days between projects, so my girlfriend and I flew out to San Francisco. Sitting in the airport in Austin, I pulled out my laptop with the idea to build up an app without access to the internet. Of course this mean no Google.

I was about to find out just how much I rely on Google to build my apps. I wanted to keep this simple. I was staring at a new tab in Chrome, expect this one had a photograph of some mountains and an inspirational quote (I have found the Momentum plugin quotes brings me a smile every morning). Looked down, in the bottom corner was a little todo app. “Ah, a todo app, people build those,” I thought to myself. And so I started.

The app was not the goal. The goal was to experience the process, or more specifically, the inability to not use the internet. I knew the app would not be impressive or difficult, but I did want to keep it to nothing but what I currently had in my package.son. Wait, I did not have anything in my package.son. OK then, vanilla JavaScript it is.

Big Sur

I actually learned a couple of things about JavaScript doing this and I might write about them later, but for now I won’t talk much about the code other then giving a link to the jsfiddle and GitHub repo.

I wrote the app in two parts. First half was built on the flight out to San Fransisco and the second half was on the return trip from LA. The flight out had a layover so I did Google some of the DOM API that was blocking my progress, but I spent most all my time then looking for a dinner spot once we touched down. I have both parts checked into GitHub if you wanna look at the commits. So while the app really is nothing of interest, it was a fun challenge.

A rainy Big Sur

In the JavaScript days that are full of frameworks, it refreshing to have no packages or heavy API to worry about. APIs abstract implementation details, but they open creativity by keeping your head out of the weeds and in the clouds, but plain javascript feels really good too. I found myself applying ideas from framework API that I probably would not have thought about without the expose. Again, I thought it was a fun exercise.

I was going to add a delete todo feature, but I decided to watch the last half of Alien instead.

Avery + San Francisco, Market Street leading to the FInancial District in the background